Chuck Palahniuk - Haunted
Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter—sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined “Artists’ Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months” and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of “real life” that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But “here” turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world—and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell—and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.
→ Chapter 1 When the bus pulls to the corner where Comrade Snarky had agreed to wait, she stands there in an army-surplus flak jacket—dark olive-green—and baggy camouflage pants, the cuffs rolled up to show infantry boots. A suitcase on either side of her. With a black beret pulled down tight on her head, she could be anyone.
“The rule was . . . ,” Saint Gut-Free says into the microphone that hangs above his steering wheel.
And Comrade Snarky says, “Fine.” She leans down to unbuckle a luggage tag off one suitcase. Comrade Snarky tucks the luggage tag in her olive-green pocket, then lifts the second suitcase and steps up into the bus. With one suitcase still on the curb, abandoned, orphaned, alone, Comrade Snarky sits down and says, “Okay.”
She says, “Drive.”
→ Chapter 2 Under the next streetlight stands the Reverend Godless, next to him a square suitcase. It’s still early morning enough that every color is black or gray. There, the black fabric of the suitcase is scarred with silver zippers running in every direction, a black Swiss cheese of little pockets and slots, sacks and compartments. Reverend Godless with his face—just red-raw meat around a nose and eyes, steak stitched together with thread and scars, his ears twisted and swollen—his eyebrows are shaved. Then, sketched on with black pencil in two surprised arcs that rise almost to his hairline.
→ Chapter 3 Our first week, we ate beef Wellington while Miss America knelt at every doorknob and tried to pick the lock with a palette knife borrowed from the Duke of Vandals.
We ate striped sea bass while Miss Sneezy ate pills and capsules from the rattling jars in her suitcase. While she coughed into her fist, and wiped her nose on her sweater sleeve.
We eat turkey Tetrazzini while Lady Baglady toys with her diamond ring. With the platinum band turned around, she talks to the big diamond that seems to sit cupped in her palm. “Packer?” she says. “This isnothinglike I’ve been led to expect.” Lady Baglady says, “How can I write anything profound if my environment isn’t . . . ideal?”
Of course, Agent Tattletale’s videotaping her. The Earl of Slander holds his tape recorder to catch every word.
A cough-cough, here. A cough-cough, there. Here, a gripe. There, a bitch. Everywhere, a complaint. Miss Sneezy says the air is swimming with toxic mold spores.
→ Chapter 4 In the blue velvet lobby, something comes thudding down the stairs from the shadows of the first balcony. Step by step, the thudding gets louder until it’s rumbling, round-dark, rolling down from the dim second floor. It’s a bowling ball, thudding down the center of the staircase. Rolling black-silent across the lobby’s blue carpet, Sister Vigilante’s bowling ball passes Cora Reynolds where he licks his paws, then past Mr. Whittier drinking instant coffee in his wheelchair, then past Lady Baglady and her diamond husband, then the ball knocks, heavy-black, through the double doors, disappearing into the auditorium.
“Packer,” Lady Baglady tells her diamond, “there’s something locked in here with us.” Making her voice low, almost a whisper, she asks the diamond, “Is ityou?”
→ Chapter 5 That summer at the Villa Diodati, Mrs. Clark tells us, it was just five people:
The poet, Lord Byron.
Percy Bysshe Shelley and his lover, Mary Godwin.
Mary’s half-sister, Claire Claremont, who was pregnant by Byron.
And Byron’s doctor, John Polidori.
Listening, we’re sitting around the electric fireplace in the second-balcony smoking room. The Gothic smoking room. Each of us pulled up in a yellow leather wing chair or a needlepoint sofa or tapestry loveseat we’d dragged from somewhere, the carved, pointed legs leaving ruffled trails in the dusty, matted carpets.
→ Chapter 6 “Let’s start with the end,” Mr. Whittier would say.
He’d say, “Let’s start with a plot spoiler.”
The meaning of life. A unified field theory. The big reason why.
We’d all be sitting in the Arabian Nights gallery, sitting cross-legged on silk pillows and cushions stained with spots of mildew. Chairs and sofas that stunk of dirty laundry when you sat down and pushed the air out of them. There, under the high-up, echoing dome, painted in jewel colors that would never see daylight, never fade, among the brass lamps hanging down, each with a red or blue or orange lightbulb shining through the cage of patterns cut out of the brass, Mr. Whittier would sit there, eating dried something in crunching handfuls from a Mylar bag.
He’d say, “Let’s get the big, big surprise over and done with.”
→ Chapter 7 Morning starts with a woman yelling. The woman’s voice, the shouting, is Sister Vigilante. Between each shout, you can hear the butt of a fist pound on wood. You can hear a wooden door boom and bounce in its frame. Then the yelling again.
Sister Vigilante yells, “Hey, Whittier!” Sister Vigilante shouts, “You’re late with the fucking sunrise . . . !”
Then the fist, pounding.
Outside our rooms, our backstage dressing rooms, the hallway is dark. Beyond that, the stage and auditorium are dark. Pitch-dark except for the ghost light.
→ Chapter 8 We’re in the Mayan foyer, the walls covered with plaster, pitted to look like lava rock. The fake lava rock is carved to look like warriors wearing loincloths and feather headdresses. The warriors wearing capes of spotted fur to look like leopards. The whole room telling the story it wants you to accept as the truth.
Carved plaster parrots trail tailfeathers in rainbows of orange and red.
From fake cracks and crumbling places in the plaster stone, made to look ancient, high above our heads sprout chains of fat purple orchids made of paper.
→ Chapter 9 It’s in the Italian Renaissance lounge that Mrs. Clark finds Director Denial slumped over a heavy, dark wood table. The table dripping with blood from every edge. The sticky blood already flocked with a layer of cat hair. Director Denial with a rope of twisted nylon stocking tied around her wrist. A meat cleaver is sunk in the table. Above the nylon stocking, the Director’s hand lies pale in a puddle of dark red.
On the floor under the table, Cora Reynolds chews on a severed index finger.
“My dear,” Mrs. Clark says, looking at the crusted, bloody stump as the Director wraps a scrap of yellow silk around and around to cover it. The blood soaking through the yellow. Mrs. Clark steps forward to help, to wrap the silk tighter, and she says, “Who did this to you?”
Director Denial twists her nylon tourniquet tighter, saying, “You did.”
At this point, everyone is looking for an edge.
→ Chapter 10 Mother Nature slips into some kind of black coat. It’s a military uniform or an ice-skating costume, black wool with a double row of brass buttons up the front. A black velvet majorette with her split nose scabbed together with dark red. She gets her arms through each long sleeve, then says, “Button me up?” to Saint Gut-Free.
She wiggles what’s left of her hands, and says, “I don’t have the fingers I need.”
Her fingers are just stubs and knuckles. Only her index fingers are left for dialing telephones after she’s famous. Punching buttons on a cash machine. Fame already reducing her from something with three dimensions to something flat.
Mother Nature, Saint Gut-Free, Reverend Godless, we’re all dressing in black before we carry Mr. Whittier down to the subbasement. Before we play this next important scene.
→ Chapter 11 Not every day was filled with terror.
The Matchmaker called this one job “picking white peaches.”
You drag two scrolly white sofas together, face to face, straight under the “tree.” On this island of sofa, you build a “ladder” by piling together gold-carved little tables. Each table with its heavy, gray marble top veined pink. On top of those, you stack brittle, eggshell-delicate palace chairs, so you can climb higher and higher. Until you’re looking down into the gray nest of everyone’s dusty wig, everyone’s face tilted back so far their mouths hang open against their neck. So high you can look down into the pit behind their collarbones and see the stair steps of their rib cage disappear into their dress or collar.
→ Chapter 12 It’s Sister Vigilante who finds the body. She’s coming down the lobby stairs, from the first-balcony foyer, from turning on the lights in the projection booth, when she stumbles over Miss America’s pink exercise wheel gripped between two dead-white hands.
There, in the video camera’s little viewing screen, the Duke of Vandals’s stretched out at the foot of the lobby stairs, his fringed buckskin shirttails hanging out, his blond hair fanned out, facedown on the blue carpet. The pink plastic wheel is between his hands. One side of his face is stomped flat, the hair pasted down in every direction with blood.
The royalties to our story split one less way.
→ Chapter 13 We have no food. No hot water. Pretty soon, we may be trapped here in the dark, Brailling our way from room to room, feeling, hand over hand, every moldy, soft patch of the wallpaper. Or crawling over the sticky carpet, our hands and knees crusted, heavy with dried mouse turds. Touching every stiff carpet stain, branched with arms and legs.
We have no heat, now that the furnace is broken, again—the way it should be.
→ Chapter 14 We find Comrade Snarky collapsed on the carpet in front of a tapestry sofa in the second-balcony foyer. Her face, blue-white, framed by the pillow of her crusty, gray wigs. The wigs piled and pinned together. None of her moving. Her hands are bones beaded together with tendon inside the flesh of her black velvet gloves. The cords of her thin neck look webbed with skin. Her cheeks and each closed eye look caved in, sunken and hollow.
She’s dead.
→ Chapter 15 Behind the lobby snack bar, the microwave oven dings, once, twice, three times, and the light inside shuts off. Chef Assassin pops open the door, and takes out a paper plate covered with a sheet of paper towel. He lifts the towel, and steam mushrooms into the cold lobby air. On the plate, a few long curls of meat still pop and spit, steaming in their pools of melted grease.
Chef Assassin sets the plate on the snack bar’s marble countertop and says, “Who wants thirds?”
→ Chapter 16 To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days. The lights come on when Sister Vigilante raises the sun, but at sunrise today, it’s a smell that pulls us out of bed. The perfect dream of a smell that pulls us out of our dressing rooms, into the hallway. Us, zombie-walking, pulled along by the nose.
Director Denial steps into the hall, falling halfway to the floor before her hands brace against the wall opposite her open door. Wedged against the wall to stay upright, she says, “Cora? Kitty, kitty?”
→ Chapter 17 Some stories, Mr. Whittier would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up.
Miss America is clutching her belly in both hands, squatting on the yellow seat of a wing chair in the Gothic smoking room, rocking forward and back with a shawl around her shoulders. If her belly looks big, or if she’s just overdressed, we can’t tell. She rocks, her arms and hands lined with the swollen red welts and scabs from cat scratches. She says, “You ever hear of CMV, cytomegalovirus? It’s deadly to pregnant women, and cats carry it.”
→ Chapter 18 In Miss America’s dressing room, in the gray concrete and bare pipes, kneeling beside the one twin bed, Mrs. Clark is saying how having a child isn’t always the dream you might imagine.
The rest of us, we’re in the hallway to spy. We’re all afraid we’ll miss some key event and be forced to take another person’s word.
Miss America curled on her bed, curled on her side with her face to the gray concrete wall, she doesn’t have any lines in this scene.
And, kneeling beside her, Mrs. Clark’s huge, dry breasts shelved on the edge of the bed, she says, “You remember my daughter, Cassandra?”
→ Chapter 19 In her dressing room, Miss America is screaming.
In bed, her skirts pulled up and her stockings down, Miss America screams, “Don’t let that witch take my baby . . .”
Kneeling next to the bed, toweling the sweat from America’s forehead, the Countess Foresight says, “It’s not a baby. Not yet.”
And Miss America screams, again, but not in words.
In the hallway outside the dressing-room doorway, you can smell blood and shit. It’s the first bowel movement any of us has had in days, maybe weeks.
→ Chapter 20 The Baroness Frostbite leans closer, a steaming bowl of something liquid cupped in her hand, and she says, “No carrots. No potatoes. Now, drink it.”
And, curled on her bed, in the camera spotlight, Miss America says, “No.” She looks at the rest of us crowded outside the doorway, Director Denial included, then Miss America turns away to face the concrete wall, saying, “I know what that is . . .”
The Baroness Frostbite says, “You’re still bleeding.”
→ Chapter 21 According to Mrs. Clark, the average person burns sixty-five calories per hour while asleep. You burn seventy-seven calories each hour awake. Just walking slow, you burn two hundred. Just to stay alive, you need to eat 1,650 calories each day.
Your body can only store about twelve hundred calories of carbohydrates—most of them in your liver. Just being alive, you burn through all your stored calories in less than one day. After that, you burn fat. Then muscle.
This is when your blood fills with ketones. Your serum-acetone concentrations soar, and your breath starts to smell. Your sweat stinks of airplane glue.
→ Chapter 22 The Matchmaker is alone in the Italian Renaissance lounge when we find him. Most days, while the lights are on, he just stands there at the long, black wood table with his zipper open and the meat cleaver in one hand. In his eyes: to chop or not to chop.
“Shooo-rook,”the sound from his family ritual.
Proof that one day your worst fear might just disappear. No matter how terrible something looks, it might not be around tomorrow.
The Matchmaker, he’s stopped asking the rest of us to swing the cleaver. Why should we help him hog the future spotlight? No, if he wants to be mutilated so bad—let him do it himself.
The table, each leg is carved to look like different sizes of balls, all balanced or beaded together in a straight line. The balls that touch the floor or the tabletop look the same size as apples. The ball in the middle of each leg is the size of a watermelon. All four legs, the same greasy black color. Long and narrow as a coffin, the table looks carved out of black wax. Long and flat, and smudged, so it reflects nothing.
Same as always, the Matchmaker stands there, hatchet ready. His chin pressed to his chest. His eyes watch his dick poke out his open zipper the way a cat would watch a mouse hole.
→ Chapter 23 The ghost light is our only campfire left. Our last chance. The glaring-bare bulb on a tall stand, center stage. The safety valve made to keep old gaslight theaters from exploding, or the light always left on inside a new theater to keep any ghost from calling the place home.
We’re sitting around the light, the circle of people still here, sitting on the stage, from where you can see only the gold-paint outline of each auditorium chair, the brass rail snaking along the front edge of each balcony, the cobweb clouds that hover across the dead electric-night sky.
In the dark rooms behind rooms, the Matchmaker and the Missing Link are dead in the Italian Renaissance lounge. In the subbasement below the basement, Mr. Whittier and Comrade Snarky and Lady Baglady and the Duke of Vandals are rotting-dead. In their dressing rooms, backstage, are Miss America and Mrs. Clark. All of their cells digesting each other into runny yellow protein. The bacteria in their guts and lungs going wild with bloat.
→ Chapter 24 Mr. Whittier leads Miss Sneezy to the door. To the world, outside. The two of them, hand in hand. Here is our world without a devil, our Villa Diodati without any monster to blame. He’s hauled the alley door open a little, open enough so a ray of real sunlight angles in from the alley. That bright slot, the opposite of the black slot we found when we arrived.
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